Brussels - EU government ministers are to meet in Lisbon on Monday to discuss how to use travellers' data to detect terrorists and illegal migrants while preserving the privacy of its citizens. Justice and interior ministry officials from the 27-member bloc will debate a variety of security-related issues, including some controversial proposals by Franco Frattini, the EU's justice, freedom and security commissioner.
These include plans for a European Passenger Name Record (PNR) and a register of foreigners entering or leaving the bloc that would ultimately include details such as their photograph, fingerprints and even a scan of the retina of their eyes. Under the proposals, law- enforcement officials in all member states would be allowed to share such data with colleagues across the EU.
"The PNR is a new proposal dealing with the security of our citizens and is designed to prevent dangerous people flying into Europe from outside Europe," Frattini told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Frattini said he planned to submit the PNR proposal for preliminary discussions to the ministers meeting in Lisbon and that he expected the EU's executive arm, the Commission, to adopt it in early November.
The European PNR follows a similar initiative adopted by the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"Europe is a target of terrorism, just like the United States. And I simply cannot ignore that there is a real threat that one day terrorists will try once again to attack a country in the EU," Frattini said.
Madrid in 2004 and London a year later sustained devastating attacks by Islamist terrorists and the police arrested a number of terrorism suspects in Germany and Denmark in recent weeks.
Frattini also wants to shut down internet sites that provide instructions on how to assemble and handle explosives.
And he wants new technology to be used to crack down on the tens of thousands of immigrants who enter the EU illegally each year.
Ministers will be called to discuss a register of individuals entering and exiting the bloc. The register would hold digital photographs of travellers, which would be used by border guards to verify those on the subject's identity document.
Such a register would eventually make use of more and more sophisticated biometric identifiers such as fingerprints and, one day in the not-so-distant future, iris recognition.
"The idea is to pool resources and make a better use of existing technologies. Biometric identifiers will allow a perfect identification of people, enabling us to avoid problems or misunderstandings in the identification of people entering or exiting the EU," Frattini told dpa.
Illegal immigration remains one of the most sensitive and divisive issues within the EU.
Member states have agreed to set up a common border patrol agency known as Frontex, which became fully operational in late 2005.
But while Frattini argues that member states "finally agree that Frontex is extremely useful and is working well", others complain that the Warsaw-based agency continues to be greatly underfunded and therefore unable to fulfil its mission.
"Madrid is very unsatisfied with the results so far and feels almost that 'nobody cares'" about Frontex, one Spanish diplomat said ahead of the meeting.
The Lisbon meeting is informal, meaning officials will not be bound to reach any formal decision.
Other issues on their two-day agenda include child protection and the state of play of Schengen, the 1985 agreement that abolished systematic border controls among participating member states.
Portugal, which holds the six-month rotating presidency of the EU, is also working on an internet site allowing both professionals and individual citizens access to all European justice-related tools and instruments.
The website would include a list of missing children within the EU. The initiative may well have been inspired by the international media frenzy sparked by Madeleine McCann, the British four-year-old who went missing from the Portuguese holiday resort of the Algarve on May 3.
